“Is this the way the world ends?” Once passionate lovers, their relationship launched on the buoyant tide of youth, sex, and endless possibility, Eva and her husband have entered a strange and barren country. A decade later, as the marriage has turned cold and her husband begins an affair with a beautiful younger woman, Eva embarks on a series of passionate one-night stands of her own, both mystified and exhilarated by her reckless behavior. As the days grow shorter, she and her husband come together and grow apart, until her mother’s illness draws her home, to the place where her youthful sexuality first burgeoned, wild and threatening. As she reflects on the mysterious ways that love and sex are intertwined, meditations composed during the strange and languid hours of early morning, she comes to understand the sources of her passion and possibly to imagine a way forward, as neither wife nor daughter, but a woman confident in her own desires. By turns witty, explicit, and elegiac, The Blue Hours gives voice to deep currents of female desire that readers will recognize as deeply felt but often unspoken.